Crop

Circle crop image Crop image

Optimize

Compress image Remove background Upscale image

Modify

Resize image

Convert

Other

Convert JPG to PDF

PNG to WebP, Smaller Files That Keep Transparency

Swap a bulky PNG for a lean WebP that keeps its transparency and loads faster.

or drop the image here

Quick answer

Araluma turns a PNG into a WebP and keeps the see-through parts intact. Hand it one picture and the browser's built-in image engine rebuilds it on your own device, so that single file is never sent off anywhere. Hand it a few at once and they travel to our server, which works through them together and hands back one download, then clears that download within about 2 hours. Anywhere the PNG was see-through, the WebP stays see-through too, because WebP carries a full alpha channel, which is exactly why it beats a JPG when you need a leaner file without flattening the cut-out. By Google's own WebP figures, a lossless WebP runs about 26 percent below an equal PNG, and a lossy WebP with alpha lands near a third of the size. What comes out here is lossy WebP at a near-lossless setting, trading a sliver of bit-level detail for a smaller file, while looking the same as the source PNG at ordinary viewing sizes. For pixel-exact archival copies, hold on to the original PNG.

How to convert PNG to WebP

How to convert PNG to WebP

Pull a PNG into the drop area or click to browse for one. The work kicks off the instant the file lands, with no Convert button anywhere, and for an everyday image it wraps up in well under a second. A Download button then saves the WebP under the source name with a new ending. Convert one and it runs in your browser, hand over several and they ride to our server together. The same path serves phones and desktops, no install required. To handle another, just drop the next PNG. Hand it an animated PNG and only the first frame survives, since the WebP it makes here is a single still rather than a moving sequence.

Transparent pixels pass through to WebP

Transparent pixels pass through to WebP

An 8-bit alpha channel lives inside WebP, so each transparent pixel in your PNG lands just as transparent in the WebP. Nothing turns white, no fringe rings a cut-out, and no clean-up in an editor is needed after. This is the very reason to favor WebP over JPG when your PNG carries transparency, since JPG owns no alpha and has to swap clear pixels for a solid color. Logos, icons, product cut-outs, interface mockups, screenshots with rounded corners, anything resting on a see-through backdrop, all of it crosses over untouched. There is no switch to flip for this, it simply happens, because carrying alpha is part of what WebP was built to do.

Reasons to switch from PNG to WebP

Reasons to switch from PNG to WebP

Chiefly, you get a much lighter file while transparency and visual quality hold. Google's official WebP figures show lossless WebP roughly 26 percent under an equal PNG, and lossy WebP with alpha near a third the size of a comparable one. Lighter images arrive faster, which feeds straight into Largest Contentful Paint, one of Google's Core Web Vitals and a known ranking factor. PageSpeed Insights even calls out PNG under its next-gen-formats suggestion, and moving to WebP clears that flag. Support is no obstacle either, since Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all read WebP natively.

Quality settings and the lossy trade-off

Quality settings and the lossy trade-off

Araluma writes the WebP at a near-lossless setting tuned for both photos and graphics, so at ordinary viewing sizes it looks the same as the PNG it came from. Held at this level, WebP is technically lossy, which means a little bit-level precision is surrendered against a flawless lossless copy. For nearly all web work, logos, icons, interface assets, photographs, that gap is invisible. When the job is pixel-exact, such as medical scans or archival masters, keep the PNG and let the WebP be the export. On photographs you can usually expect a 50 to 70 percent drop in size, layered on top of the structural edge WebP already holds over PNG.

Where the PNG actually gets converted

Where the PNG actually gets converted

It splits by how many you hand over. Convert a lone PNG and the whole job unfolds in the tab on the browser's own image engine, right on your device, with nothing uploaded and nothing about the file recorded. Prove it to yourself, open DevTools, keep the Network panel up while you convert that one image, and count zero outbound requests carrying it. Convert a handful together and they ride up to our server, which works through them and sends back a single download. That download is cleared from our server inside roughly 2 hours, and you can wipe it the instant you have saved it. So one image never leaves the browser, and a batch sits on our server only long enough to build what you take away.

When the original PNG is still the right choice

When the original PNG is still the right choice

WebP travels far, but not everywhere. A handful of design programs, print pipelines, and in-house content systems still ask for PNG. Some operating systems drag-and-drop PNG without a thought while wanting a plugin for WebP. For a working file you will open and edit again and again in a desktop app, keeping the lossless PNG as the master spares you any build-up from repeated decode-and-rebuild rounds. Let WebP be your export for the web and let the PNG remain the source. And if you ever need to run the other way and turn a WebP back into a PNG, the webp-to-png tool covers that trip.

How it works

  1. Hand over a PNG

    Slide the PNG onto the page, or browse for it through the picker. Its see-through parts ride along. Convert one and it stays on your machine, drop several and they ride up to our server to be handled together.

  2. Sit back

    You do nothing more. A typical picture becomes a WebP roughly as quick as your finger lifts, with no Convert step and no spinner along the way.

  3. Watch it shrink

    The result reports how big it came out. Clear spots stay clear, and the WebP ought to weigh visibly less than the PNG you began with.

  4. Keep your WebP

    One tap on Download writes it out, old name, fresh .webp ending. Lined up more? Toss each onto the page and they go through one by one.

Frequently asked questions

Will transparency be preserved when converting PNG to WebP?

It is. Because WebP holds a full alpha channel, every clear patch of your PNG stays clear once it is a WebP. That single fact is why WebP beats JPG as a target whenever you begin with a transparent PNG, since JPG owns no alpha and has to paint the clear spots a solid color while WebP leaves the cut-out exactly as it found it. Logos, icons, product shots, interface pieces resting on see-through backdrops, all of them carry over whole, asking nothing extra of you.

Why convert PNG to WebP?

For a leaner file that keeps both its transparency and its looks. By Google's WebP numbers, the lossless flavor runs roughly 26 percent under an equal PNG, and the lossy flavor with alpha lands near a third of one. A leaner image arrives sooner, which helps Largest Contentful Paint, a Core Web Vitals measure that Google weighs in ranking. PageSpeed Insights even points at PNG as a next-gen-format opportunity inside its image audit. On top of that, every major browser, from Chrome and Firefox to Safari and Edge, reads WebP without help.

Does converting PNG to WebP lose quality?

At the near-lossless setting Araluma uses, photos and graphics look the same as the source PNG at ordinary viewing sizes. WebP held here is technically lossy, so a sliver of bit-level precision goes toward a smaller file. For everyday web use, logos, icons, photographs, that gap is invisible. For pixel-exact or archival work, keep the PNG and treat the WebP as the delivery copy. The conversion leaves your PNG untouched, sitting on your device just as it was.

How much smaller is WebP than PNG?

Google's official WebP figures put lossless WebP around 26 percent under an equal PNG, and lossy WebP with alpha at roughly a third the size of a comparable one. The exact ratio rides on the content, with graphics that have wide clear areas and solid color blocks gaining the most, while busy, detailed photos see a smaller but still useful drop. Either way the WebP comes out lighter and the transparency survives.

Is it safe to convert PNG to WebP here?

It turns on whether you convert one picture or several. A single PNG is rebuilt right in the browser, so that file is never uploaded, and you can check it by opening DevTools and watching the Network panel mid-conversion, where no outbound image request shows up. Convert several at once and they ride to our server to be handled together, then that download is cleared within roughly 2 hours, and you can remove it yourself as soon as you save it. Either way, nothing of your image lingers past building your download.

Does WebP work in all browsers?

It does, for all practical purposes. Native reading arrived everywhere once Safari 14 shipped in 2020, joining Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, which together account for nearly every browser people actually run. The exceptions are the genuinely old ones and some embedded webviews, and for an audience that might include those, PNG remains the cautious pick. Anyone on a browser from the last five years gets WebP without trouble. If you want to confirm a specific case, the WebP entry on caniuse.com lays the support out.

The details

Notes from the team on craft, formats, and the small decisions behind a good round crop.

How WebP achieves smaller sizes than PNG
WebP runs in two separate modes. Its lossless mode pairs spatial and color prediction with an entropy stage that outdoes PNG's DEFLATE, landing roughly 26 percent better compression on typical images by Google's published numbers. Its lossy mode borrows a block-based transform from video work, built to drop detail the eye barely notices while holding what it does. When an image carries alpha, WebP compresses that alpha losslessly on its own track while treating the RGB data lossily, which is how lossy WebP with transparency can come in near a third the size of a PNG at matching visual quality. PNG's DEFLATE only knows lossless and can never tap the perceptual bargain the lossy track makes. That structural split is the whole reason for the size gap.
The alpha channel in detail
PNG and WebP both carry 8-bit alpha, letting any pixel state an opacity from 0 for fully clear up to 255 for fully solid. When the platform image engine rebuilds a PNG as WebP, it reads each pixel's RGBA values and feeds the alpha straight into the WebP compression step, which keeps it under lossless compression no matter how it treats the RGB. So a fully clear pixel at 0, a partly clear one anywhere from 1 to 254, and a solid one at 255 each map to the identical state in the WebP. On a logo with a soft drop-shadow or anti-aliased lettering on a clear background, that delicate edge softness rides through whole. JPG cannot do this, since its container has no alpha field and forces the image onto a background color before it encodes anything.
Core Web Vitals and image format choice
Largest Contentful Paint clocks how long the biggest visible element on a page takes to show up in the viewport, and on most content pages that element is the hero image. Google folds LCP into its Core Web Vitals ranking signal, and PNG is a repeat offender on LCP because of sheer weight, where a 4K photographic PNG can run several megabytes while the same picture as a near-lossless WebP is a fraction of that. PageSpeed Insights names this directly under its next-gen-formats item and points at PNG as the format to swap out. Turning the PNGs that sit on a page's critical render path into WebP is among the highest-payoff single moves for measured speed. The timeline keeps it safe, with WebP in Chrome from 2011, Firefox from 2019, Safari from 2020, and Edge since its Chromium rebuild.
Lossy output and the near-lossless setting
WebP exposes a quality knob from 0 to 100, where higher numbers hold more detail and cost more bytes. Araluma fixes that knob at a near-lossless point chosen to balance fidelity against size across the usual web categories of photographs, interface graphics, and icons. At this point the output reads as indistinguishable from the source PNG at normal screen distances. Strictly, a little bit-level precision slips against a true lossless encode, so a byte-by-byte check between the decoded WebP and the original PNG would surface tiny numeric gaps, all sitting under the threshold of human sight on photographic material. For medical scans, satellite imagery, or archival preservation where lossless is a hard rule, the right move is to keep the PNG and treat the WebP purely as a delivery export rather than a working copy.
Metadata behavior
Turning a PNG into a WebP sweeps the EXIF, IPTC, and XMP fields off the output, which is what every one of the three big browser engines does. Color profiles are where the engines part ways. Chrome and Safari keep the sRGB tag riding on the WebP, while Firefox clears the lot, the ICC profile and all. So the WebP reads as sRGB-safe everywhere, yet a wide-gamut tag, Display-P3, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, sitting on the source PNG will not last through Firefox. That gap bites in color-critical professional work, so when true color fidelity has to ride along, pick a converter that writes ICC data deliberately, or press the profile tag back on afterward using a metadata editor built for the job.
When to keep PNG and when WebP is sufficient
The call is quick. If the picture is ultimately bound for a web page or web app and the viewer is any browser from 2020 on, WebP is the right export. If it has to open inside a design app like Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer, check WebP support in your exact version first, since it varies. If it is headed into print, lean on PNG or TIFF, as most print RIPs ignore WebP. If it is going out by email, PNG is the safer bet, given how erratic email clients are with modern formats. And if it is a working file you will edit and re-save over and over, keep the PNG as the master. WebP at near-lossless quality makes a fine delivery format, while PNG remains the better one for archiving and editing. The clean workflow holds the PNG as the original and ships WebP to the web.